The Shocking Truth Book 1
Copyright© 2025 by somethin fishy
Chapter 13
24 September
Alex was once again dressed in grey. Only this time, he wore an armored trench coat and boonie hat. In addition to the handgun in a shoulder holster, Alex carried an AR-15 chambered in 7.62NATO. He brought a heavier-hitting AR since each shot would do far more damage. With his advanced abilities, Alex wouldn’t miss a target, so carrying additional ammunition wouldn’t matter. Additionally, using a firearm chambered in 7.62 would allow him to pick up extra ammunition from dead snipers.
To Alex’s surprise, the truck he stole from the gang was right where he had left it, and a scan showed it hadn’t been messed with. Having a set of wheels made Alex’s job much easier, and within minutes, he was off.
Alex’s first targets were the lower-ranking government officials who had been bought. They wouldn’t have the protection the higher-ranking members would have and, therefore, would make easier targets.
For the most part, Alex quickly grabbed everyone on his first-round target list. Instead of killing them in their homes, he took them to an abandoned warehouse where he would brutally kill them before removing their heads. Alex had been extremely cautious not to disturb the family unless they were involved. A quick scan of the target would show whether the family was involved. If they were, Alex would grab them too and quickly loot their home of cash, jewelry, and firearms.
Once Alex had everyone on the first list, he got to work collecting information and causing them as much pain as possible. Alex found a way to torture a person without leaving a mark. Instead of marking the body, he would mess with the nerves leading to the brain, so the brain thought the body was being tortured.
Many people couldn’t figure out why it felt as if their flesh was being burned off, but the flesh wasn’t burning. However, it was an extremely effective form of torture that Alex had perfected by the time he was done. The best thing was that instead of spending hours on a person, Alex could complete the torture modification within seconds.
With his targets feeling as if they were being tortured, they were doubtful to escape, but to prevent any possibility of anyone escaping, Alex sealed all points of entry. Nobody was going to get in or out. Sound also couldn’t escape, so nobody on the outside would know what was happening.
The first round of targets had been clerks, parole officers, and beat officers. In total, Alex had already recovered fifty million in cash and jewelry, along with a large number of firearms. It was time for the next layer of corrupt officials. These included commanding police officers, medical personnel, and court officials.
Alex had laid out a circular route so he wouldn’t have to backtrack very often. Unlike the lower officials, this collection round didn’t go nearly as smoothly. Alex’s first hint that this batch would present a challenge came when he went after the first person on the list, police Captain Bradley Thompson.
Thompson had been on the force for thirty years and had been a dirty cop for almost all of it. Alex pulled up near the captain’s penthouse. According to the first-round captives, the captain would be here. Alex scanned the building and found considerable activity. Much more than he would have figured.
Something was happening, but Alex wasn’t sure what it was. If everyone had been concentrated, he would have said they were having a party. Instead, everyone was spread out throughout the building. Worse, Alex detected signatures on the roof. To Alex, that said snipers.
While Alex figured he was invulnerable to sniper bullets, it wasn’t something he was looking forward to testing. It would be fine with Alex if he never had to test the bulletproof theory. Instead of running in, Alex circled the block, stopping behind buildings across the street. From there, Alex climbed to the roof to look into the windows of his target’s building.
The first thing Alex noticed was the snipers on the other roof. A pair at each corner of the building was watching the street below. Alex again swore he would develop telekinesis. Working his way down the building, Alex saw several of his targets through the windows.
At first, he thought they were having an orgy, but as Alex watched, something else emerged. The participants in the supposed orgy were guards, and from what Alex could tell, their weapons were close by. It was a trap, and if Alex had walked straight in, he would have been caught. Now, Alex had the chance to plan.
While planning, Alex also noticed the microphones to capture the sounds of a gunshot. After seeing the microphones, Alex looked for the electrical signature he associated with security cameras. The entire building was covered for sight and sound.
If Alex hadn’t needed the intelligence so badly, he would have just burned the building down and been done with it. However, he needed intelligence, and some mental signatures suggested slaves were present. Alex scratched his head, trying to figure out an easy way of clearing this nest of corruption.
If he had more power, it would have been easy just to invade their minds and put them to sleep. However, Alex didn’t have that amount of power. It was Emo who figured it out. Alex suddenly saw a message across his vision.
“Use the power from the city to supplement your natural power. Signed Emo.”
Alex was stunned, and then his grin turned cold. It was the perfect solution because pulling that much power would temporarily shut down the grid, thus allowing Alex to enter the building unseen by remote security.
The snipers were easy to knock out. Once they were safely asleep, Alex went to the ground floor of the building he was in and hid in a dark corner. Focusing on the power the building drew, he diverted it to him. To keep it from overpowering him, Alex only acted as a conduit. With the extra power, Alex could enter minds from a distance and began putting people to sleep.
After enough people were out that Alex could safely enter the target building, he disabled the security cameras by tapping into them and putting them on a thirty-minute loop. Because he didn’t hack the feed but did the work internally, he wasn’t detected by the system’s security.
With cameras out of action, Alex entered the building. Again, he tapped into the building’s power supply and cleared floor after floor. Eventually, he reached the penthouse of his target only to discover he wasn’t there.
Alex had put almost three hundred people to sleep and decided this was much easier than shooting his way in. However, he needed a nearby power supply to tap into. No longer needing the extra power, Alex stopped drawing it from the building.
As he had done before, Alex began copying and scanning memories. The corrupt officials were moved to the back door for later removal. However, most of the men and women Alex found were private security. The ones who hadn’t done anything were made comfortable, and Alex would wake them once he was gone. The ones who had done bad things were piled with the corrupt officials.
Alex knew what he was doing was shady at best. He was acting as judge, jury, and executioner. The only thing that made him feel better was that the system was so bad that none of these bad people would ever face judgment if it weren’t for him. Since he could read their minds, Alex was uniquely able to judge them for what they did, rather than for what some lawyers spun.
The next problem Alex had to confront was that more people needed punishment than could fit in the van. When the loot was added, he was looking at five or six round trips. That not only took too much time but left him too vulnerable.
It was time for another experiment. Alex recruited some less-guilty security personnel and implanted a command in their minds. Each one was to drive a vehicle from the motor pool in the basement to the warehouse Alex was using. A couple of the vehicles were for Alex’s loot, while the rest were for the guilty.
Alex left and came back with his van. Into it were placed the most guilty and most valuable loot. If nothing else was taken from this building, Alex at least wanted the best stuff. After the van was loaded, Alex helped load the other vehicles, and before they left, Alex gave the drivers directions. If this worked, Alex would go light on their torture and would kill them quickly.
It made Alex happy that there hadn’t been any slaves in the building, which made up for missing his primary target. While Alex recovered several million in cash, several hundred pounds of jewelry, a couple of hundred gold bars, and enough firepower for an army company. However, he had no idea where his primary target was. Worse, nobody there seemed to know.
Unlike previous targets, Alex didn’t burn the building down. All he did was ensure the security he left wouldn’t wake up for several hours. They would be in enough trouble the way it was, and Alex figured that would be enough for them. The security commander seemed to hint that their employer was a nasty individual, but they didn’t know much more than that.
Once again, Alex made it safely to the warehouse, where he killed everyone from the first batch. They had been tortured enough. With the amount of pain Alex was able to simulate, it was like they had suffered for several weeks. The heads of the corrupt cops went into one pile while the officials went into another.
Alex had the drivers offload their cargo before driving away with the transport. They would drive the vans into the river before passing out. While drowning wasn’t the easiest way to go, they would be unconscious when they died.
Once the drivers left, Alex set the torture routine on the new captives and fully copied their memories. While not telling Alex where the missed target was, all the memories did give him more targets for another time. He had enough to deal with and didn’t need any more.
Aside from the overload of information, Alex was gathering so much loot that he wouldn’t have room to store everything. However, Alex decided that, like the extra targets, this was a problem for later.
As Alex drove to his last target, he reviewed all his intelligence and sorted the new information. Some of the latest information filled in gaps in what he knew already. He had security assignments, which security personnel were clean and dirty, the security layout, where their headquarters was, and who was paying them.
It was no surprise that Judge Amy Rodriguez had contracted the security firm. What was a surprise was that Alex couldn’t get a signature from anyone outside the roving guards. Wondering what was blocking him, Alex pulled out his cell and noticed no signal. That was something Alex didn’t know. Now, he had to be aware of cell phone jammers as they restricted his ability to see people’s mental signatures. It made sense once Alex thought about it. He was looking for the electromagnetic waves a person’s mind produced, and cell jammers blocked those signals.
With the new information, Alex decided to take what he had as a victory and retreat. There would be other nights, and he wanted to experiment with this because he didn’t know whether jammers only blocked his ability to see people or blocked all his abilities. Until he knew he didn’t want to risk attacking.